re: Student Loan payments restarting

The issue is the interest. Say you take out 50k and you make 40k at a starting job. After ten years you have been paying 100-200 a month but now owe 150k. So yes I agree pay back the 50k plus interest but the interest should be set from day 1 and not compounded.

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Or…….. How about you borrow money, you pay it back??? Maybe we need to do a better job of educating students before they take out a loan on what their monthly note will be, what the anticipated salary for their major is, and how that will fit into a monthly budget Maybe we should cap the amount of money a student can borrow based on major and anticipated salary

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I think it is nuts to expect the average college matriculant to have a sufficient grasp of their career prospects and aptitude, to commit to tens of thousands (to $100k+) of non-dischargeable debt. Teenagers with little to no work experience and probably little educational experience outside of a given school system have very little perspective to base these decisions. Often their advisors (especially parents and relatives) have outdated knowledge from a different time and a different job market.

You can educate high school students about the long term impact of student loan debt service, but they are likely to have an overly optimistic (or at least uninformed) sense of how likely they are to succeed in an in-demand field of study, and how likely they are to find a lucrative career in that field.